


Dack Fayden and the Bone Palace

by AwesomePossum



Category: Magic: The Gathering (Card Game)
Genre: Gen, Infinite Consortium, Non-binary character, Planar Adventures of Dack Fayden, Why do all the worst places have the best stuff?, new plane, saurian race, tomb raiding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-16
Updated: 2019-11-16
Packaged: 2021-01-31 13:42:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21447133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AwesomePossum/pseuds/AwesomePossum
Summary: When the money runs out, Dack Fayden finds himself hunting down a mysterious artifact on a dangerous world. But it turns out his client may not have given him the whole story... Now, the Greatest Thief in the Multiverse will need all his skill and wit if he hopes to escape the curse of the Bone Palace.
Kudos: 1





	Dack Fayden and the Bone Palace

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gamb](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gamb/gifts).

> Man, I like Dack Fayden -- what a fun character! It's a good thing that he's so well-liked by fans and has so much potential to shoulder really engaging, entertaining action stories, so that nothing bad will ever happen to him in canon.  
...  
Anyway, this is potentially Installment One in a set of adventure serials about Dack Fayden and his exploits throughout the multiverse, set in between The Secretist and War of the Spark. Hopefully there will be more to come.

_Why is it that the worst places always have the best stuff?_ Dack Fayden thought to himself, sweating profusely in the heat.

  
Vashra-jir’s massive sun blazed down angrily, its blistering violet rays doing little to dispel the eclipse-like darkness, but still managing to bake the earth like a furnace. He had seen that the sun rarely, if ever, fully set, instead skirting along the horizon like most suns did at high latitude summers in decent places. At best, it dipped below the edge of the world for an hour or two. The rest of the time it smoldered in the dark sky like an ember, keeping this plane in a constant state of boiling, purple-tinted twilight.  
Which led back to Dack Fayden, crouched behind the broken face of a long-destroyed statue and vigorously basting through his clothing. He’d already removed his coat and leathers and folded them into his pack; he was sorely tempted to take his vest off as well, but had forced himself to keep it on for the protection it provided, thanks to an enchantment on it that would let it blunt any blow as well as a breastplate. The enchantment was also supposed was also supposed to make it cool and lightweight, which it technically was, just to no avail. He could still feel it pressing against his torso on every side, and right now it was mostly serving to trap a growing sluice of sweat against his back.

  
Against his chest, he could feel the Exalted Triskelion radiating cool energy, the only relief from the oppressive heat. It was the symbol of Ephara, goddess of cities and civilization on Theros, and frankly one of that world’s kinder deities. He had picked up this medallion from a vendor outside one of her temples, a man offering items of blessing and good fortune to pilgrims. The man’s cart had been corruscated with supposed holy objects, practically buried under symbols, sigils, tokens, and relics, all worthless as anything but emblems. The Exalted Triskelion Dack had picked out from a string of them, hung like candles from a rod that jutted from the back of the cart. The seller had enthusiastically claimed that each one of them had been touched by the hand of Ephara herself, imbued with the divinity of her blessing, that the shape’s three spiral arms warded off the three maladies of diseases, curses, and madness. He had claimed a lot of things.

  
Except of all the mundane trinkets on the cart, this particular Exalted Triskelion really _had_ been in contact with Ephara, had received her personal benefaction.

  
Dack had been able to feel it from a hundred feet away, not flashy or aggressive, but the subtly powerful pull of an undertow running beneath still waters. The thing looked plain enough, slight corrosion obscuring fine details from the original working but preserved by its own magics to look much newer than it was, so that nothing distinguished it visibly from the dozen other Exalted Triskelions on the line. But he knew--the second he touched it, he knew it was a genuine artifact, that hundreds of years ago Ephara had breathed a word of protection on it, that it really did ward off afflictions. It was only supposed to work for the virtuous soul, but apparently the three-spiraled pendant had a rather liberal interpretation of what that meant, because it had been working fine for Dack for years.

  
He had paid the vendor the handful of coppers he asked for. Given what the medallion was actually worth, he figured it basically counted as a successful theft for purposes of his personal record.

  
The pendant had activated almost as soon as he arrived on Vashra-jir; he had still been picking himself up awkwardly from his usual hard landing when he felt it start to hum through his bones and effuse cool power against the skin of his chest. Something about the sun here, he thought. When the violet light fell on him, he had felt...something, the ill light somehow prickling _beneath_ his skin. The Triskelion had activated and the feeling ended, but it didn’t ward against most types of physical injury and the light was still searing him like spitted meat, well on its way to turning all of his exposed flesh as red as his hand.

  
He couldn’t wait to grab his prize and leave Vashra-jir to being someone else’s problem.

  
Trying not to think about his discomfort, Dack took another long drink of warm water from his canteen and placed a set of Izzet spectral lenses over his eyes. He adjusted the rotators in the goggles’ frame until he had compensated for the twilight illumination, and with the scene lit and sharpened, looked out over the valley below. Most of it was blanketed in a thick cover of jungle, in shades of deep purple and wine red and navy blue instead of the typical greens, but otherwise as lush as a jungle could ever wish to be. A city sprawled out along the banks of a river, all of it glimmering amethyst in the sunlight. It wasn’t a huge city, as cities went, and it was certainly no Ravnica, but every square block of it was ridiculously ornate. The entire sprawl was dotted with soaring towers capped by domes encrusted in mirror-mosaics, and corruscating spires that twisted toward a black sky jutted up everywhere like untended saplings in the Rubblebelt. Every structure seemed covered in intricate layered crenellations, detailed carvings and bas reliefs, peaked arches with scalloped edges, and false walls carved into complex lattices of geometry--he couldn’t see a single surface wider than a table that wasn’t absolutely dripping with some kind of architectural adornment. At the street level and across rooftops there were countless hypostyle halls, seemingly infinite rows of columns in the shape of maddeningly detailed statuary. It looked more like an enormous unbounded temple complex than a city.

  
There were few solid walls in the place, nearly every level pared away into colonnades or jali or endless rows of carved windows, and at each level thick tangles of flora spilled out and clung tenaciously to the many holding places on the walls. In fact, there were bursts of plants everywhere, seemingly scattered at random throughout the city--patches of eye-searing red all shot through with massive dark flowers. Clearly imbued with some local importance, the red plants were all over, as if a rain of them had fallen from the sky. The whole thing looked like an impossibly intricate hanging garden, an impression emphasized by streets run through by canals diverted from the river, the waterways choked with lotus and even a few more of the strange clumping plants near the edges.

  
Wiping the droplets of sweat from his face, Dack frowned and raised a spyglass to his eye, a somewhat clunky process with the spectral lenses in place. The city was laid out in the valley, overlooked by a towering peak cloaked in dense, dark jungle. And jutting up out of the vegetation like a bone protruding from a wound, there was a palace. In contrast to the red sandstone structures of the city below, it was a gleaming ivory white, the color of a polished tooth. And the entire structure was cracked neatly down the center, fractured like an egg that had hatched something unthinkable. It loomed over everything, casting an ominous shadow that Dack could feel from here. He was a psychometrist, a specialist in artifacts and magical objects--and sometimes, a building was nothing more than one very large magical artifact. This was such a building. Even from here he could pick up the reek of eerie beauty and horror and death. The Palace of Thara Ayur.

  
So of course, that was where he needed to go.

  
_Cursed fates, how do I get myself into these things?_

  
Of course, he knew how. He knew perfectly well. It was because he’d had a number of ventures go bust through no fault of his own--mostly through no fault of his own--and now he owed his financier a rather large sum of money. He grimaced, causing sweat to cut new paths down his skin. And unfortunately, J’dashe had gotten much less reasonable since his untimely death. Dack supposed that ghosts had little use for leniency, but even so, he felt that the Orzhov pontiff was being a bit of a prick about things lately. At least he didn’t have people out looking for him on Ravnica, not yet anyway; J’dashe knew he was a planeswalker and likely didn’t want to waste the resources on a man who literally might not be anywhere on the entire world. But nevertheless, Dack now had to avoid several useful haunts, safehouses, fences, and criminal headhunters because they were in Orzhov territory and he didn’t want to bump into any mutual friends who might want to rough him up by way of a friendly collections reminder. He was also cut off from the Vault Inviolate, a bar catering to underworld aristocracy and one of his best locations for getting new contacts, new jobs.

  
Well, formerly one of his best--now strictly off limits.

  
Which made it tricky to get new jobs, at least ones with a big enough payout to start digging him out of the hole.

  
Which meant his debt was growing with interest like a cancer.

  
Which meant he had to turn to less savory alternatives.

  
Dack collapsed the spyglass and tucked it into a side compartment of his pack, then got to his feet, an expression of disgust pulling at his features as he felt all the places where sweat-laden cloth stuck to his skin. As soon as he got the Amulet of Flowers and got the blazes off of Vashra-jir, he was going to treat himself to a long, cool bath in one of those fancy Selesnyan rejuvenation springs where naiads washed away your cares. But unfortunately, there were a few steps between here and there, and most of them went through an utter quagmire.

  
He sighed as he picked up his pack--he couldn’t bring himself to put it on properly and slung it over one shoulder, trying not to let it touch any more of his body than absolutely necessary. It was the same thing he was trying to do with his thoughts, with somewhat less success.

  
Dack had worked with the Infinite Consortium some years in the past. The organization was under Tezzeret then--a person who swung between borderline unhinged sociopath and occasional full-on frothing-at-the-mouth madman--who was hardly Dack’s favorite person. But, then as now, the Consortium paid exorbitantly well for the kind of work that required a planeswalking thief. And so for a while he had swallowed his qualms about Tezzeret and his suspicions about the organization as a whole and done a few odd jobs for them; nothing too extreme, no artifacts that were obscenely powerful or anything like that, just a few hard to get items here and there. Things had been going well for a bit; he had built up a few tidy stashes of cash around the city, paid his way into the graces and information networks of some important people, and even carried on a bit of a casual fling with another one of their contractors, a blackly seductive necromancer named Liliana. For awhile, everything was turning up Dack.

  
But then things had gotten...bad. His other jobs started getting foiled, tipped off, and several of his stashes were hit in Boros and Azorius raids, eventually putting him on both guilds’ Most Wanted Lists. Suddenly, no one on Ravnica would touch him.

  
No one but the Consortium.

  
It left him with nowhere to go but them, something that had always struck him as a little too convenient, a little too neat. Even his dalliance with Liliana had evaporated when she took up with Jace, one of the Consortium’s new recruits. Jace struck him as bookish and probably in over his head, and although he was apparently a potent telepath, he was also young enough that Dack felt a twinge of sympathy for him at Liliana’s less-than-tender mercies. As for him, with the situation at the Consortium getting unstable under Tezzeret and all of his worthwhile resources and connections on Ravnica drying up, he’d had one foot off the plane for awhile. When he caught one of Tezzeret’s Consortium lackeys following him, he’d decided it would be a wise time to disappear, grabbing a gauntlet he’d stolen from the garrison at Sunhome and hoofing it offworld to Theros.

  
Kind of a lot had happened then, to the point where the situation on Ravnica had slipped his mind in the face of other, more...existential concerns. But eventually, he’d returned to the city world to see if the heat had died down, only to find out that someone had apparently flipped the mirror on him. Tezzeret was gone, deposed and apparently dead. Jace had gone from nondescript youth to Living Guildpact. Dack had always wondered if those two events were connected, but knew better than to get involved in Ravnican politics, where cutthroat could be a very literal term. Still, he had kept low to the ground after learning that the Infinite Consortium itself had been reduced to metaphorical rubble on Jace’s way out, just in case the new Guildpact was holding an old grudge against former Consortium associates. Eventually, it became clear that that was not the case--it had taken a few years for the outer shell of the old organization to reassert itself. But rise again it did, unimpeded and under a new leader.

  
Dack shook his head. He preferred Tam d’Shur to Tezzeret, but barely. When he’d gone back to the Infinite Consortium--once again out of options, but this time fairly certain that the Consortium was uninvolved in the situation--Tam had conducted himself with polite if cold manners, and unlike Tezzeret, he didn’t seem prone to meltdowns, outbursts, or other behaviors more befitting a rabid animal. But he was not at all shy about using telepathy to listen in on people’s thoughts, and using the information in those thoughts as a lever against them.

  
And there had always been something in those yellow eyes, something both predatory and flat, like a viper. Something that saw other people not as people, but as Dack saw artifacts, as objects that could be read, broken down into their components, used as resources…

  
Actually, Dack was certain he cared about artifacts more than Tam d’Shur had ever cared about people.

  
Still, when you were a thief you were going to work with criminals by default, and at least Tam and the new Consortium seemed relatively stable. Beggars couldn’t be choosers, and he very much didn’t want to become the former. Or an Orzhov debt-geist for that matter.

  
So all the way back around again, here he was, still dripping sweat like a sieve but now trudging down a hilltop under blistering violet sunlight and a cloud-strewn black sky, toward a place that clearly wasn’t anxious to see him, to retrieve an item he didn’t know thing one about, with the intent to deliver it to someone he wasn’t really all that keen on. He tried to tell himself that at least it kept things interesting, that the money was good and the scenery changed, but somehow that did little to stoke his optimism. Moving carefully beneath the treeline, feeling the chill of the Triskelion against his chest and wondering if he was about to regret this entire job, Dack nevertheless picked his way down the trail towards the city below the palace. If he was going to go in there--and ultimately, he knew he would; if there was an ominous palace or formidable mausoleum or creepy abandoned manor around you virtually never found the artifact you wanted just sitting in a local village curio cabinet--he would prefer to have at least a little information first.

  
Going through the jungle was easier than expected; he had thought some bushwhacking would be required, but the weirdly-colored vegetation was reasonably thin on the ground, and the upper canopy provided a welcome screen from the fierce sun. As he began to glimpse the outskirts of the city through the undergrowth, he reached into his pack and found the pocket he wanted, a small one little bigger than a jewelry case and lined in metal to shield its contents from detection. Flipping it open, he reached inside and fished out a braided cord made of leather. The leather was made from the sealskin of a selkie, enchanted by some of the finest mesmerists at the Academia Paliano di Ars Magica. A Seeming Cord--one of only a few ever made. When bound around the throat, it made everyone see what they expected to see as long as the wearer didn’t do anything disruptive. He knew that he could have sold it on Ravnica for a sizeable sum; House Dimir would have paid him his weight in zinos to get it and the Golgari and Izzet wouldn’t have been far behind, not to mention any number of unguilded interests. But he had never even considered selling it. Some things were worth more than money.  
And of course, since he wasn’t going to sell it, he didn’t mention it at all, as the interested buyers might well become interested assassins and help themselves to it for free.  
Looping the Seeming Cord around his neck and securing the ends with a tight knot, Dack strode through an understory that became more overgrown as the massive trees thinned and more light filtered down; he found himself pushing aside broad leaves the size of his torso in shades of burgundy and mauve. As he got closer to the city, he felt the Exalted Triskelion’s power growing, as if whatever it was warding off was growing stronger. It was now downright chilly against his skin. He ignored it, for now--as long as it was working, that was all that mattered, and frankly the cold was refreshing. At last, with a final shove of a massive spade-shaped leaf that left thin cuts across his forearm, he stepped out onto the stone street.

  
The street felt more like a canyon, with massive walls of stone climbing skyward on either side and a channel of water running down the middle, darkly reflecting the sky so that the lotus-like flowers bursting above the surface looked like stars at night. The bright red plants were in proliferation here, although oddly they each stayed in their own isolated clumps. They were also much stranger up close, made of broad yucca-spikes and willowy tendrils and soft sprays of grassy blades and twisting vines like morning glories, as if they were bundles of four or five different plants all gathered together and painted a uniform color. He considered uprooting one of the smaller ones, about the size of a breadbox, and packing it back to Ravnica. The Simic might pay reasonably for a specimen to poke at, if it survived the Blind Eternities, maybe even the Selesnyans--although his current standing with the Conclave was complicated, thanks to saving their holy tree but also trying to steal spells from their holy book. But after a moment, he opted to just leave the plant where it was. If it was a sacred plant or some such, it would be a good idea not to have one on his person if things went sideways with the locals. Best to let it be, for now.

  
Interspersed with some of the bright red plants, the sides of the building were covered with engravings of strange figures engaged in all kinds of activities. Dack unconsciously reached into his shirt and placed the Triskelion outside of it--the medallion’s cold was uncomfortable enough now that he preferred it off of his bare skin--and looked closer as the carvings, intrigued. The figures engraved into the red sandstone were bipedal, but with long, stiff tails and draconic heads, almost suarian creatures with what looked like feathered headdresses. Following the figures along the wall, he saw them depicted forging metal, building canals, scribing on stone tablets with chisels, and what appeared to be astronomy as they gazed upward at what he took for the sky through a telescope-like apparatus. He wondered if maybe these creatures were worshiped as deities who had brought culture and civilization to the people--he’d seen that kind of motif before, some god-like race that bestowed the secrets of agriculture or writing or whatnot. Or maybe they were supposed to be dragons? Anthropomorphic dragons, like the Anji spirits with the heads of foxes or ravens? Maybe some sort of ritual garb like mummers’ costumes; he’d seen places where it was taboo to depict the actual figure in art and so stylized representations were used as placeholders-

  
“Hey you!”

  
Dack snapped away from the wall and spun sharply toward the voice. Initially looking at eye-level, he had to lower his gaze considerably to meet the speaker’s gaze. Standing a dozen feet away was a small creature, its head roughly as tall as Dack’s thigh. It was covered in scales that were variegated between splashes of inky indigo and large swathes of white. Both colors were coated in the glossy rainbow sheen of spilled oil. Two legs, curved backward like a bird’s, terminated in three curved claws, with a fourth claw higher up that seemed almost like a thumb. The hands and arms were roughly humanoid except for having three fingers instead of four, and being capped with polished, blunted claws. Its neck was lizard-like and pulled into a neat S-curve; a head like a drake’s had a long muzzle that gradually transitioned into a sharp, hooked beak at the tip. From its skull, a rustling crest of feathers in mottled dark blue and white. A long, stiff tail kept the little creature balanced as it cocked its head to look at him.

  
Dack blinked. The creature didn’t. It leaned in; no, not leaned, but stretched its neck forward like a heron watching fish in a pond. Its cornflower blue eyes were punctuated by black pupils that--Dack noticed, and then was unerringly unable to look away from--were the shape of elongated diamonds.

“What are you?”

  
Dack could have asked the same question. It was too much like a bird to be a viashino, or at least any variety of viashino he’d ever seen, too much like a humanoid to be a drake or a dragon, and too much like a dinosaur to be a naga. Although it did make the carvings make sense. _Sometimes it really is the obvious answer_, he thought, feeling a little foolish. Then the creatures words caught up with him: what are you?

  
Not who--what.

  
Dack’s hand instinctively went to the Seeming Cord; it was still there, still emitting its magic. It should have concealed him… He looked at the little creature, still waiting with what appeared to be a great deal of interest. He noticed that its proportions were somewhat off, large head and huge eyes and gangly legs, its scales small and smooth all over instead of the overlapping raised back plates on the carved images, its head crest made of scattered handfuls of feathers instead of the full display the wall figures sported. Even its curiosity was bold, guileless. Childlike.

  
He crouched down.

  
“Hey little one,” he said, trying to project calm. “You can see me?”

  
The creature wrinkled its snout, and despite the species difference Dack clearly got the impression it thought he was dense. “Of course I can see you,” it said, in a tone that reinforced his initial impression. It took a few fearless steps forward, stretched its head toward him, and to his surprise gently tapped at his face and jaw with its beaked muzzle. After a second, it withdrew again, tilting its head to the side like a bird. “Are you from the Southlands?”

  
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m from...a long way from here. I’m a human. What do your people call themselves?”

  
“Silurians,” the small creature--the small Silurian--answered. “I am named Nir.”

  
Dack put his hand to his chest. “I’m Dack,” he said.

  
Nir blinked, a nictitating membrane sliding across--his? her?--pale eyes before their actual eyelids closed. “Dack.” They rolled the word around in their mouth, making a series of rapid clicking noises in consideration, thinking. Then they looked at him, and he got the sudden impression of shrewdness despite their youth. “Why are you in Prohta?”  
He looked up at the massive structures, infinite carved Silurians looking back down at him. “Prohta.” It was his turn now to feel a strange word on his tongue. “Is that the name of this place?” Nir nodded, and Dack considered how much to tell them. “I’m here looking for something. Something old that a friend of mine heard was here, in Thara Ayur.”

At the name, Nir’s scales lifted slightly like hatches being opened, making them bristle like a pinecone, and what they had of a feathered crest fanned out. “The Bone Palace,” they said quietly.

  
“Have you been there?” Dack asked, to which Nir quickly shook their head.

  
“No one is allowed to go to the Bone Palace,” they said, as if such a thing was so obvious a dog should understand it. Nir turned their head to the north, and although it set them facing one of the surrounding walls, Dack knew they were looking through it, to the looming white edifice on the hillside. “That is where the Unmaking comes from.”

Dack found himself looking that direction as well. “The Unmaking?”

  
Nir nodded sharply, and Dack shifted back onto his heels for a more comfortable crouch, finding himself grateful that this child could somehow see through his illusory protection. “You seem like a smart…” He pursed his lips before deciding to just ask, “Sorry, but are you a boy or a girl? No offense.”

  
“Do not be stupid,” Nir replied with a snort. “I am far too young to be either.”

  
_Huh. Well then._

  
“You seem like a smart young Silurian,” Dack rephrased, erring on the side of neutrality and noting this for the mental list of strange things he had encountered in his travels. “What can you tell me about this Unmaking?”

  
Nir gave him yet another sky-blue look that implied he must be some sort of wandering idiot, and Dack momentarily considered that he was making a bad first impression for humankind. But after a moment, the little Silurian started speaking.

  
“The Unmaking came years ago, in the time of my great-grandfather,” they said, in the intonation of someone who had been told this story many times before and spoke the words from memory. “The Holy Empress,” Nir bowed their beak to their chest reflexively and quickly pressed clasped hands to their brow, “saw that the people had become powerful and arrogant in their magic, and pretended they were higher than mere mortals. But she told them that only the divine like herself had the right to wield the powers of the heavens. She said the people of Prohta should cease their sorcery. And when the people did not listen, she...she made it so. She cast the Unmaking, to show that magic was a power beyond any mortal. It broke her palace and spread through the valley, and all those who had magic in their blood were Unmade.”

  
Dack frowned. “But what do you mean, Unmade? Do you mean she killed them?”

  
“No. They stopped being themselves,” Nir said, looking uncomfortable, as if they shouldn’t have to explain this and very much didn’t want to. “They became _khet phang_. They were Unmade.”

  
“I don’t understand,” Dack pressed. He didn’t like making the child uncomfortable, but he was getting the sense that this could be very, very important. “What is _khet phang_? What happened to them?”

  
Not looking, Nir pointed. “_Khet phang_,” they said quietly.

  
Dack followed their finger, trying to figure out what they were pointing at. There was one of the red plants in front of a wall carving; the bas relief only showed Silurians dancing in front of a fire, nothing that struck him as out of the ordinary. “The dancers? The fire? Is it-”

  
“_Bhatka_!” Nir spat, and Dack could tell it was a dirty word by the way the child sounded unused to it. “Not the wall. _Look_.” They pointed again, emphatically, to the left, the right, next to him. Dack stared, but he couldn’t see anything in common to the places they pointed at, just the vermilion clumps of the strange plants that were scattered everywhere-

  
Dack stopped.

  
Suddenly, he felt clammy even in the sweltering heat.

  
He looked again at the plants, blood-red, unlike any plant he had ever seen, scattered throughout the city like cast off debris--or the victims of a volcano, frozen in ash where they stood without even a chance to escape. He swallowed, trying to stop his throat from clamping shut, and pointed a finger at one of the plants that he couldn’t quite keep from shaking. “Those are _khet phang_?”

  
Nir nodded without a word.

  
“And they are...were...Silurian magic users?”

  
Another silent nod.

  
Dack abruptly felt the need to sit and found himself doing so before his mind gave the order, his body just rocking itself back on his haunches of its own accord until his backside connected to the paving stones with a dull thump. He thought about the plant back down the path, the one he had almost dug out of the cracks in the stone with his knife as a sample.

  
He thought about how _small_ it was compared to the others, how he had briefly thought it must be a young plant.

  
He felt sick.

  
Veering away from the thought like a stag fleeing the wolves, his mind went to the holy metal of the Triskelion, spreading its protective cold through the damp cloth of his shift like a diffusing blot of ink, and he instinctively looked down at it. Hoary crystals of ice radiated out from the medallion along his shirt, a patch the size of his hand frosted over with the output of power as the relic warded off the forces pressing on him. Forces trying to take hold of him, drawn to the magic in his blood as they had been drawn into the Silurian spellcasters, seeking to wend their way inside him and...Unmake him.

  
The Unmaking.

  
The curse.

  
He was staring wildly, taking it all in against his will. Seeing the many, many _khet phang_ plants within his field of vision, brilliant red patches like blood splatter, he found that he was breathing thin and fast, but still struggling to get enough air.

  
“Dack?” A tiny clawed hand touched his shoulder; he started away, falling back so that he had to plant a hand on the stone to catch himself. Nir was looking at him, their scaly, beaked face somehow displaying concern. “Are you alright?”

  
“I...yeah. I, um-” His hand groped at the contours of his pack; when his fingers touched the canteen, the sloshing shift of its weight told him it was nearly empty. “I could use some water,” he told the Silurian, sounding as if he had just run across the Transguild promenade with arresters on his heels. Nir nodded, and took a hold of his arm with both their tiny hands, leaning backward with all their weight to try to help pull him to his feet. Dack was surprised at how little the child actually weighed--even for their tiny size, the weight at the end of his arm was less than a fully-laden pack--but the effort helped him to center himself, to focus.

  
_Put it aside. You have a job to do here._

  
A job that apparently involved an evil sorceress, and her city-killing curse. He tried to stay calm as Nir lead the way down the street, tried to force himself to only think about the situation in terms of flat logic, of planning.

  
_Don’t think about how the plants all over this city used to be people, how you can guess where they were when they died by their position, how you can look at them and kind of see who never saw it coming, who was looking in confusion trying to figure out what was happening, who realized doom was coming and tried to run. How you can sort of see two parents with their child in those three clumps, a larger group of people hanging out of the windows in the upper floor of that building, probably trying to see what the commotion was about, how those two at the edge of the water were probably friends or lovers just sitting on the edge of the canal, probably enjoying their day, probably didn’t even notice_-

  
Dack shook his head sharply, eliciting a worried look from Nir.

  
_No! You need to stop, refocus--this isn’t helping_. He forced a deep breath of kiln-hot air into his lungs, pushing back against his horror at what had happened, his fear for himself. _Think: what are you facing?_

  
As his mind settled in, glad of something to do, of planning instead of just dwelling on the creeping terror of this place, he started to piece it together. He would bet zinos to ostraka that the “holy” bit of the Holy Empress was a sham, a facade to keep the locals in line--in his experience, people who claimed divinity and demanded that people kowtow to them over it were exactly as divine as Dack himself was. More likely, she was just a powerful spellcaster of some sort. Maybe she had seen the other spellcasters in Prohta as rivals, potential usurpers of her power? That made a kind of sense, especially if, as Nir had told him, she had made some sort of decree to them to stop practicing magic. Being the only person in town who could use magic would both secure her position at the top of the heap, and help sell the illusion that you were something holy, something beyond mortals.

  
_So she tried to demand that they abandon their magic, and when it didn’t happen…_

  
The Unmaking. Trying to keep his emotions out of it, he considered the effect.

  
One: it turned people into plants, apparently on the spot.

  
_Fucking terrifying. Best not to think about it._

  
Two: the people it affected were spellcasters--or he would guess, people who were capable of becoming spellcasters, since he now couldn’t stop noticing that a number of the plants were smaller than Nir, which, assuming there was a correlation, would make them no more than children and unlikely to be trained casters.

  
_Don’t think about it._

  
Three: it was still active, not just a one-and-done effect. The uncomfortable cold radiating from the Triskelion was a reminder that it was still working hard, still performing its function and warding off something, something that was very much trying to harm him, pressing in around him, held off only by the thin bubble of divine blessing from a faith that he didn’t even believe in on an item that probably shouldn’t work for him on moral grounds-

  
_Don’t think about it don’t think about it don’t think about it._

  
Suddenly, his knees bumped against something small, and Nir made an annoyed sound, snapping their beak shut with a clack of disapproval. The Silurian had come to an unannounced halt where their street met another, larger thoroughfare. As before, they made a series of rapidly cascading clicks, a thinking noise. This time, the timbre of it was somewhat concerned.

  
“I am not sure what the grownups will think of you,” Nir murmured, punctuated by more clicking. “They...do not always like things that are new. Different.”

  
Dack carefully peered around the corner. Adult Silruians were out and about as the road moved into the heart of the city--less than he would have expected for a city this size, although he supposed that having a massive segment of your population wiped out just a few generations ago would do that. Still, as much as it gave the place an eerie, ghost-town feel, there were still too many of them for him to avoid being noticed. It was almost strange thinking of mundane concerns like being spotted in the face of such a terrifying apocalypse, but dealing with the problem would at least be a welcome return to routine.

  
“Right,” Dack said, ducking back behind the wall and setting his pack on the ground, digging through it and enjoy the relative respite for the skin on his back of not having anything pressing against it, lying in the sweat puddle that was his shirt.

  
The front still crackled with frost, the shirt around the medallion positively bristling with layers of ice crystals.

  
Forcing himself to ignore it, he rummaged through the pack until he found another one of the secure metal boxes, this one slightly elongated. Flipping it open, he pulled out a smoky nine-sided crystal on a silver chain, and looped it around his wrist. Grabbing the crystal in his other hand, he spoke the trigger--_ulkafi_, the Alkabahn word for hidden--and saw, felt, the crystal flare with quick black power. It wasn’t invisibility, exactly, but for a short while it would allow him to blend in with the shadows until he practically vanished, and since the Seeming Cord apparently didn’t work on Silurians, the T’saglass would have to do. Just until he could get some water, get through the city, and figure out how he was supposed to face a powerful, ancient, sorceress wielding a curse potent enough that somewhere an Innistrad witch was weeping ashen tears of envy. Shouldn’t take any time at all.

  
“Okay,” Dack said to Nir. “I’m ready. Just lead the way, I promise I’ll be right behind you.”

  
Nir didn’t move, and after a moment Dack look down. They were staring back up at him with that look again, the look that said he shouldn’t be allowed to eat with a fork because he might hurt himself with the pointy bits.

  
“You didn’t do anything.”

  
“Oh, come on!” Dack snapped at the crystal, shaking the chain.

  
“What’s that supposed to do?”

  
“It’s _supposed_ to make it so people can’t see me,” Dack growled, not noticing the look of keen interest on Nir’s face until it was too late.

  
“Let me see it!”

  
And then quick little claws had snagged the chain off his wrist, dangling the crystal from one scaled hand. Dack’s first response was a flash of panic that the T’saglass would draw the Unmaking down on Nir, who didn’t have the protection of a holy pendant, and he grabbed for it. As soon as he snatched it back, he felt the power flare up again from the opaque gem. Nir appeared unharmed.

  
Dack frowned. “Hang on a minute.”

  
He handed the crystal back to Nir.

  
Nothing happened--no, not just nothing; Dack felt the crystal power down as Nir took it in hand.

  
He took it back.

  
The power returned.

  
He handed it to Nir.

  
Power down.

  
Power up.

  
Suppressed.

  
Released.

  
Dack started at the child. “Are...are you immune to magic?”

  
Nir blinked at him, turning their head in confusion. “How would I know?”

  
And of course they were right--if everyone who used magic was killed generations before Nir was born, who would anyone find that out? How could they. But it was making more sense the more he thought about it. Back on Fiora, the lords of Paliano were constantly trying to arrange marriages that wed powerful mages to each other, striving to breed even more powerful mages into the family, to amplify the talent down the bloodlines. And it often worked. This seemed to be the opposite; generations of completely unmagical people having completely unmagical children until they produced Nir: a total magical null. Dack had heard of such a thing before, had even heard that there were a few in the Tenth District, but he had never before met one.

  
_First time for everything_, he thought, feeling a little stunned.

  
“Do you know if any of the other Silurians are like you?” Dack asked.

  
Nir could only shake their head.

  
“Well then,” he continued. He put the T’saglass away--the Seeming Cord would be enough to find out what he wanted to know, one way or the other--and set his teeth. “Let’s go find out.”

  
Ignoring the hissed protests from Nir, Dack stepped out into the street.

  
A few Silurians glanced up at him, with the casual look one might give a stranger, but nothing more. The general lack of outcry convinced Dack that being null was a talent specific to Nir--who ran up behind him and nipped him sharply on the forearm, eliciting a quick yelp, the thin line of blood barely visible on his bright red skin.

  
“You bit me!”

  
“You did not listen.”

  
Dack had nothing to say to that, and settled for muttering under his breath.

  
They made their way down a series of streets to an intersection, a square blessedly bathed in shade from the temple-like buildings rising overhead, and featuring a fountain spouting from a tall, intricately carved pillar where the street’s two canals intersected. Dack thankfully sat where he was told, agreeing to Nir’s stern instructions not to move, and watched the locals. He quickly noticed that the other Silurians were wholly dark scaled with bright splashes on their feathers crests, not piebald in opal-white like Nir, and he wondered if the child’s strange coloration and strange response to magic were linked. He mulled the idea over and wished he wasn’t so aware that there were terribly few of them, far less than there should be for a city this size. When the Unmaking came, it must have struck a huge percentage of their population, for their numbers to be so sparse generations out...

  
He clasped his hands together to still the tremor that ran through them, trying his best not to notice the absolute proliferation of _khet phang_ across the square, across the entire city. He wondered why no one had removed them. Then he thought about it for a moment, really thought about it, and shuddered. Seeing them everywhere was horrifying, but uprooting them...well, he got why no one had done it. For a second, he thought of coming home to Drakestown and finding that death had swept everyone away, under the auspices of a madwoman seeking power. He quickly shoved the idea back, but the memory stuck in his brain, tethering the past and the present. More than fear, he felt a sudden swell of sorrow for the Silurians here who had lost friends, family, loved ones, had them taken away in an instant because someone else was afraid to lose their power.

  
He knew how they felt.

  
Dack shook his head to clear it. He had to concentrate on coming up with a plan to get into the Palace of Thara Ayur, the Bone Palace as Nir had called it. He ignored the fact that the Triskleion was now so cold that it burned uncomfortably--and that his fist was clenched so tightly that the knuckles turned pale pink under dyed skin. For what felt like a long time, Dack sat wrapped in his own thoughts, trying to concentrate on something else besides the reality of these people’s lives--anything else.

  
A loud wail cut through the everyday noise of the city.

  
Instantly, Dack was on his feet, looking for danger, trying to pinpoint the sound. He didn’t have to try for long; a moment later the sound came again, a high, keening wail that was somewhere between funeral ululation and animal cry. His fear shifted from an alertness to danger to fear of a different sort, a kind of dread. Even from a Silurian throat, he recognized the sound. The cry was not an expression of fear. It was the sound of grief. Dack knew he should just stay where he was; it wasn’t his concern and it didn’t need to be. He should just wait where he was told.

  
But he was already walking across the square at a quick clip, joined by several other nearby Silurians and cursing himself for a fool for getting involved.

  
A small crowd of people had formed, anxious Silurians tapping their muzzles together and running their cheeks alongside each other like cats, clearly upset. They were clustered around something, someone--fortunately, although they all perceived him as one of them, Dack still had the benefit of actually being about two feet taller than the feathered suarians and was able to look over their heads and see what was happening. In the center of the knot was a Silurian. Female, Dack thought; he had been watching people from his spot in the middle of the square, and the females seemed to be the taller ones with darker colors and smaller crests. She was holding a baby. It was seemingly a very young baby, covered in a patchwork of scales and feathery down, and lacking any kind of crest. The tiny creature was no bigger than a housecat. The Silurian female holding it was collapsed on the stones, the piercing keen subsided into a low, oscillating noise of unimaginable pain. Dack realized she was weeping.

  
“What is it?” The words slipped out before Dack remembered he probably shouldn’t be drawing attention to himself, but it didn’t matter. No one had any spare attention for him anyway.

  
“_Khet phang_ pollen,” someone near him muttered grimly. It was an old Silurian, his scales going matte and bleached at the edges. The old fellow gestured; Dack could see a few accumulations of crimson speckles in the soft feathers that spotted the infant’s skin. He was about to ask why that mattered when someone yanked on his arm from behind. Hard.

  
He stepped back from the crowd and turned to look at Nir, who had puffed up a throat pouch under their chin, making them look literally swollen with anger. “I told you to stay,” they hissed. “This is not your business, you should not be here!”

  
“But I just wanted to know-”

  
“You do not know anything!” The words were a snarl, struggling to be quiet and avoid notice but no less sharp. “You should do what I tell you!”

  
“I’m sorry, I only-”

  
Suddenly the crowd noises behind them stopped. Dack turned to look. The knot of people had shifted, rearranging themselves. Most had gathered behind the mother, leaning close in solidarity. One lone Silurian, an older female, stood in front. With a choked noise and other clawed hands clasped to her forearms--although whether they were in gentle solidarity or pushing her to act, Dack couldn’t tell--the mother handed the infant to the older woman. The infant rustled a little, uncurling with a wide yawn that only showed the tips of a few protruding teeth, and suddenly the mother wailed again, shrieking. Hands restrained her, murmuring quiet words as they pulled her back, and Dack saw everything drain out of her as she crumpled to the ground like the ruins of a fallen building. The others went to gather around her, but she snarled at them, snapping her jaws to drive them back with the crack of razor edged beak and hard white teeth.

  
“Back!” she cried, her voice as cracked and blistered as Dack’s skin. “Get back! I will watch my child to the end.”

  
The group dutifully got out from in front of her, though they still remained close at her side, their hands on her from all around as she lifted her head--watching as the older Silurian took the baby and began walking away.

  
“Nir,” Dack whispered, something cold and leaden growing in the pit of his stomach, “what’s happening?”

  
“The infant is marked,” Nir said, barely moving their mouth. Even just above a whisper, he could hear the strange flatness in their voice, as when they had told him the story of the Empress and the Unmaking. The tone of words that have been repeated over and over and over until they become embedded too deep to remove. “The _khet phang_ was drawn to it because the magic has shown in its blood. If it lives, it will be Unmade in a matter of days.”

  
“Wait..._if_ it lives? What do you mean, _if_?”

  
Nir was staring straight ahead at the infant. Their voice didn’t change, but Dack saw them shaking, their scales pressed so flat to their body that it made them appear even smaller. “There is nothing we can do but show mercy.”

  
“Mercy?” Dack looked back to the woman with the infant, headed away from the mother. Headed toward the canal, toward the black water sliding smoothly under a dark sky. Already weighed down, his stomach dropped. He looked back at Nir, frantic, begging to be corrected.

  
Nir said nothing, jaw clenched.

  
“No,” he said in horror. “No, they can’t mean to do this.”

  
“It is the kindest way,” Nir whispered tightly. There was a slight vibration at their throat, and he heard a low whimper struggling there.

  
Dack’s breath was heaving in his chest, the Triskelion burning his skin with every breath. “Tell them to stop.”

  
Nir’s head snapped toward him. “What? No,” they said, sounding somewhere between fearful and disgusted. “No one can interfere, not even the parents.”

  
“Tell them to stop,” he said again, breaths ragged in his throat. His knees were shaking.

  
“No! It is not allowed.”

  
Dack took a step forward.

  
Nir bared their teeth at him. “You will get us both in trouble!”

  
He took another step, and another, moving forward before he really knew what he was doing. There was murmuring going through the crowd now as they saw him, a confused, angry noise. He knew he was being disruptive, knew he was pushing at the boundaries of what the Seeming Cord would conceal, but he didn’t care. He saw Nir desperately trying to make eye contact with him, trying to will him back.

  
“_Bahkta_, no!” they whispered violently.

  
Too late.

  
“Stop!” he called out.

  
The woman stopped. Everyone stopped. Except for the baby fussing lightly in her arms, no one moved, frozen like the stone carvings around them in the incandescent heat. They all looked at him.

  
Dack gulped.

  
“_How dare you_?” the mother breathed as if the words were choking her. “How dare you do this to me?”

  
The old man who had stood beside him fixed him with a glacial stare, colder than the Triskelion, and his voice was just as frigid. “Stranger, why do you make this harder than it must be?”

  
“I am sorry,” Dack said, sensing waves of enmity rolling toward him, dozens of livid, diamond shaped pupils skewering him like a Rakdos effigy doll. He took a deep breath, settling himself, trying to ease back from the limits of the Seeming Cord and calm the situation. “I am sorry for causing you distress,” he repeated, trying to mimic their speech patterns, “but you may not need to do this. There may be another way.”

  
The response was hostile disbelief.

  
“You are cruel,” the mother whispered, the words catching like a sob.

  
“There is no other way.” The elder’s voice was the bright, relentless steel of a Boros blade.

  
“Not now,” Dack said hurriedly, lifting his hands in supplication, “but there may be soon. I am going now to Thara Ayur.”

  
Whispers of “The Bone Palace” rippled through the assembled group, and he plunged ahead quickly before he lost them or lost his nerve. “I go to face the Holy Empress.”  
Now the whispers exploded into a volley of shouting. It took several moments before the situation had died down even enough for one shout to be heard above another, but when it did the elder asserted himself with a loud bellow, his massive feathered crest rattling angrily.

  
“No one may face the Holy Empress!” he barked, striding toward Dack. “She is divine! She commands magic through the mandate of heaven! Her will is the world!”

  
When he said her name, many of the gathered Silurians made the gesture of obeisance Dack had seen Nir make earlier, beak to chest, knuckles pressed to brows--but not everyone did. And Dack noticed the elder, now only a few feet away, was one who didn’t.

  
“I don’t think so,” Dack said quietly, forgetting his speech. “I think she’s just a tyrant, and a bully. No doubt she’s a powerful sorceress, but I’ve seen gods before--and I’m sure she’s not one of them. I know she’s not.” He leaned in, and said, even lower, “And you know it too. Don’t you.”

  
It wasn’t a question, so he didn’t phrase it as one. The elder Silurian narrowed his eyes, saying nothing to confirm--but nothing to deny either. Dack took that as his chance

.  
“People of Prohta,” he announced. “I _am_ going to the Bone Palace, and I _will_ face the Holy Empress. Before you...show mercy to the child, at least let me try. If the Empress is divine, as you say, then I will surely be killed, and it will make no difference. But if she is not,” he looked significantly at the elder, “and I succeed, then the Unmaking may be lifted, and the child can be saved. Please, let me try.” He fixed the elder with an earnest look that he hoped came through the Seeming Cord. “Please.”

  
The elder looked at him shrewdly, picking him apart as a vulture picks over bones. This close, Dack noticed that he had a few small patches of white splashed across his chest, different from Nir’s in size but not in kind. He wondered how much the old Silurian saw, and held his breath.

  
At long last, the elder gave the slightest nod of his dark, feathered head, so small that Dack doubted anyone else could see it. “You are a fool, and you may not stay here. We will wait until the sun catches the horizon for this folly to catch up with you. No longer. Now, go.” The elder leaned in, stretching his long neck like a serpent. “Luck go with you,” he muttered.

  
Then he went and gathered up the baby into his arms and walked slowly away, claws clicking dully on stone.

  
Sensing he had played his luck to the utmost, Dack wisely chose to make a brisk exit. He looked briefly for Nir in the crowd, but didn’t see them. _That’s for the best_, he thought, feeling like he’d already dug the youngster deeper into this thing than he would have liked. _Best for them to go back to their life and leave this behind._

  
Meanwhile, thanks to his damn altruism acting up, he had now put himself on a tight timeline. He wasn’t an expert on day length on Vashra-jir, but based on what he’d seen of the huge, violaceous orb since he’d arrived, he was guessing he had five or six hours at best. _Damn stupid fool_, he thought at himself--but when he thought of the little Silurian yawning, he couldn’t really bring himself to mean it. He could at least try; if things went south he could always planeswalk away. Still, he told himself, he had to go into this thing with priorities in order. The order of the day was to get the Amulet of Flowers, probably stashed in her Imperial Highness’ treasure room somewhere. Tam d’Shur was not going to be happy if he came back empty handed, and Dack didn’t really want to find out how the yellow-eyed bastard reacted to failure. Doing something about this Empress, as monstrous as she was, had to be secondary. There were monsters throughout the Multiverse, dug in on every plane doing unspeakable evils and oppressing the locals, but once you made it your business to deal with it, well, who knew where it ended?

  
_Scratch that: Empress is tertiary_, he amended, sliding everything down a notch. _Priority one is don’t get killed._

  
Climbing up the mountainous slope to the Palace was much more laborious than going down its opposite, and by the time Dack was getting close someone could have wrung him out like a rag. In the sweltering heat, surmounting the slope left him exhausted, his muscles shaking like cottonwood leaves in a breeze. He very much regretted not getting that canteen of water back from Nir--his mouth was the only part of him that felt dry. Crouching in the brush, he could just see the gleaming ivory walls of the Palace, another two hundred yards up the slope. He groaned. Panting, dripping, covered in small nicks and scratches, it might as well have been two hundred miles. This was going to require some artificial help. With a sigh of resignation, he got a case out of his pack and flipped it open to reveal four green vials.

  
Iaszon: the finest and most inadvisable combination of Selenyan herbal potency and Simic bio-tinkering to be avoided on Ravnica.

  
He’d only use it three times in the past. The first was an accident, and deeply regrettable. The second two were on purpose, and no less regrettable. The stuff worked like magic, better than magic, made you feel alive, alert, faster, stronger, sexier, the whole fruit basket. It rejuvenated you, sped you reactions and heightened your senses, all while making you feel as if you were back from the dead and ready to cut loose. Eight hours later, you got to experience a hangover that had taken iaszon as well. Guaranteed to make you wish you were dead.

  
But also guaranteed to work.

  
Wincing preemptively, Dack held his nose and drained the vial in one gulp. It took all his willpower not to verbalize his response to the gag-inducing taste of the stuff, like the smell of a forgotten potato that had rotted and turned to black ooze, and for a few long moments he was focused on just trying not to wretch it back up. Then he felt the tingling in his limbs as it began seeping into his body. Tired muscles awakened, thirst disappeared, the discomfort of dozens of small cuts and the cold at his chest and the heat everywhere else evaporated. Even the horrific taste ceased to bother him. His senses were heightened, his awareness cleared, and the gnawing fear and horror of the day were shoved aside like a slow Ravnican pedestrian.

  
Iaszon was technically not legal, but only technically, more grey market than black and not that hard to get. Probably because the primary consumers of the stuff were Boros Legionnaires looking to get an edge up. And when the police were the main clients, the product was unlikely to go away. He knew that there were some Boros officers who habitually took the stuff, became addicted to it, which he struggled to imagine because he couldn’t fathom hating himself that much--the fallout was like being beaten by an angry mob while also vomiting up an endless stream of rotting fruit. Something he was trying not to think about for the moment.

  
_At least it works fast,_ Dack thought, giving himself a moment to acclimate to his new state.

  
As soon as his mind and body were settled, he started moving up the slope, quick and quiet. He would have preferred to have done more reconnaissance, tried to get more information about the Palace and its occupants and especially about the Empress, but the iaszon was fresh and he was as ready now as he could possibly get. Better to play it by ear now, while he had an advantage.

  
And even though he told himself it wasn’t the main priority--that it _couldn’t_ be the main priority--he couldn’t help but notice the purple sun sinking lower in the sky.

  
_Get the Amulet first_, he reminded himself._ Then see what you can do about this Empress. Luck willing, the Amulet may even be able to help--the Consortium is paying a tidy price for it, so whatever it does must be powerful._ Unbidden, he thought of Drakestown. He thought of Sifa Grent. He thought of her death, of knowing that she would never be able to hurt anyone again, that there wouldn’t be any more Drakestowns by her hand. He thought of a city filled with strange plants the color of blood.

  
_Figure it out. Get the Amulet, learn what it does, and find a way to use it to stop her._

  
_Show her that she is no divinity._

  
He came into view of the palace, scanning the layout from the foliage. There would be guards, traps, spells--who knew what. He would have to take them as they came, but he could at least try to scout as many as possible before getting into the thick of it. Moving through the brush at the tree line, he took a line parallel to the palace so that he could investigate the grounds. He would circle the building at a crouch, as fast as he could go while still being stealthy, a task that made him glad he had iaszon rushing through his limbs. Then he would decide the best point of entry, ideally through an unlocked door to a kitchen garden or a low open window, although rooftops often made good choices. As long as it wasn’t the front door, he could make it work. From there, he would work his way down to wherever the treasure room was, often in the center of a building where it was most secure, most defensible.

  
Hopefully the Amulet, or maybe even other potent artifacts if this Empress was after magical power, would make enough of an impression that he could sense them as he got close. It was always a roll of the dice with that, depending heavily on the creator and the nature of the enchantment. Some items that were not exceptionally powerful still leaked magic in his psychometric awareness, because they hadn’t been bound properly, or because the creator hadn’t been formally trained in artifice, or even because they were supposed to seem flashy. A terrifying number of very powerful artifacts gave off no signature at all, and he couldn’t even detect that they were magical at all until he was on top of them. Anyway, if he could find his way to wherever this Empress stashed her valuables and have just a little bit of time, Dack was sure he could figure out how to deal with her.

  
He would just have to hope luck was with him, and improvise from there.

  
He was edging around the grounds as he made his plans, making observations with the clarity of iaszon while still running through his next steps with the other half of his mind. So even as he realized _something_ was amiss, it took a second for the realization to catch up enough to know _what_. But as he moved along his route, instinctively picking his way through the undergrowth and hugging close to cover, he soon slowed down, then stopped completely. Frowning, he carefully pushed aside a velvety-coated leaf the color of cheap wine and really looked out at the palace. Now that it had his complete attention, he immediately knew what had caught his attention, what was wrong.  
There was no one there. No servants. No staff. No gardeners or courtiers or messengers or ministers. Not a single guard. Literally, no one.

  
Dack’s hands tensed at his side. This wasn’t right. Even if this Holy Empress had holed up and barricaded herself in her seat of power like a mad Izzet in a laboratory, there should still be someone. A royal residence this large had tasks that needed to be done, food to be prepared, latrines to be emptied, silver to be polished. But the elegant grounds were empty of anyone at all. Moving forward carefully, he made a closer examination of the manicured landscape. Plants that looked like massive, plum-colored cycads grew in neat, orderly rows from a pebbled courtyard carved through with stone pathways, orderly trappings of civilization holding the line of the jungle at a stark demarcation. But beneath the plants, he now noticed smaller saplings pressing up like unkempt weeds, that some of the adult plants had begun to overgrow their neighbors, that washouts from heavy rains--gods of Theros, he missed his canteen full of beautiful, beautiful water--streaked through the substrate of pebbles like rivers on a map. A garden like this could certainly be created and maintained by magic, if there were enough people to perform regular upkeep, but without them, the spells keeping everything neat and tidy would eventually begin to fray. And the scene before him had apparently been fraying for some time.

  
So where was everyone?

  
Pulling out an aether wand, Dack slowly crept out from the treeline while sweeping it in a slow arc in front of him. Essentially a dowsing rod for active spells, it would hopefully be enough to stop him from tripping into a trap, if there were any. But Dack was starting to think this wasn’t a trap. Looking around, he spotted a few splashes of bright red in among the ornamental plants. _Khet phang_. No, he was starting to think that this place was a tomb. He reached the end of the row without so much as a whisper of alarm, a whisper of anything, and found himself looking at what had once been a long, diamond-shaped reflecting pool. Now the stone was cracked and dry, stunningly intricate mosaic work gone rust-colored with the patina of dried algae crusted over it long ago. In the center of the pool stood a fountain carved into a figure atop a blooming lotus flower; he could just make out Silurian features beneath a netting of wiry, tangled black vines drawn over the statue like a cloak.  
Still wielding the aether wand--there were indeed spells here to upkeep the grounds, but they were all badly faded--Dack smoothly vaulted over a low, wide stone wall into a paved courtyard, pavers once locked tight now being pushed apart by various flora. Hearing no one, seeing no one, it looked more and more like this palace was abandoned.

_ But then who’s maintaining the Unmaking, the curse?_

His hand went to the Triskelion. It was as cold now as it had ever been, nearly as uncomfortable to touch as a hot kettle off the stone--unlike the other magics here, the curse was definitely still going strong, and Dack actually started to worry about its ability to hold up under the strain. The magic inside it came from a goddess, yes, but it wasn’t designed as an artifact--it had just been someone’s personal symbol of faith, and Ephara had placed a blessing on it. Her magic was more than strong enough to shield him, but if much more pressure were placed on the Triskelion itself then the physical item that magic was bound to could break. And then…

  
He glanced back across the courtyard at two _khet phang_ rustling in the breeze like bloody grasses around the site of a predator’s kill, and gulped. _And then no more Dack._ The iaszon suppressed a great deal of his fear, but he was still very much aware that he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life as a houseplant. He decided the best thing he could do was keep moving. The sooner he could take care of this, the safer.

  
Moving under a shaft of shadow, Dack darted up against the wall of the palace. It was surprisingly cool in the heat, and he pressed his back against it for a thankful moment, feeling the gentle chill radiate through his damp shirt. It wasn’t smooth stone like he had expected; instead it felt like it was tiled or inset with something, giving it an uneven, rocky terrain. Glancing around to ensure the continued emptiness around him and making a perfunctory sweep with the aether wand, he turned to the wall, curious.

  
It was bone.

  
He blanched, taking a step away from the wall both to get a better look, and because he no longer wanted to lean against it so much. The wall stretched a good fifty feet in the air, a solid sheet inlaid with bone stretching up into the black sky. Some of it was broken into chips of tiles, but it other places he saw entire leg bones, rib cages, skulls, all pressed flush into the stone of the wall and polished to a sheen. And not just bone; violet light caught the edges of claws and beaks, slightly darker among the ivory skeletal ornamentation. He realized that these were all Silurian.

  
Dack had once seen a warlord who sat on a throne made from the piled skulls of his enemies. It was off-putting, but he understood it, a simple display of power meant to unify allies and cow enemies. Grisly, but an effective symbol. It made sense.

  
Turning hundreds of your own kind into a carefully-crafted mosaic to decorate your entire palace was not symbolic. It was lavish madness.

  
Maybe without the iaszon he would have been afraid--maybe he should have been afraid--but all he could feel now was anger, anger at the arrogance of it and the cruelty and the sadistic investment of effort in the whole thing. How much was it worth to have people fear you? How much did _she_ fear _them_ to do this, to coat her walls in their bones and condemn their children to death because they had magical affinity? He thought of the light Silurian infant, squirming as it was taken from its mother, it’s baby-down coated in red pollen. Just like Sifa Grent, this Holy Empress saw people as a kind of livestock, to be herded and controlled and beaten down and slaughtered. Just like Sifa Grent, she had inflicted incalculable suffering on innocent people to secure her own power.

  
But unlike Sifa Grent, this Holy Empress was still alive.

  
Dack gritted his teeth. He was no hero, he knew that. He was a thief, and a good one, a person who preferred stealth and tricks to a fair fight, who would rather avoid combat as much as possible. He was not someone who charged into danger, armored in light and bearing a shining sword, and he was not someone who saved the day.  
However, he suddenly felt like he could maybe do a bit of monster-slaying.

  
Following the macabre wall, Dack found an ingress, an open hallway made of water-stained marble, and with barely a sound entered the palace proper. Extending his psychometry, his senses aided by the iaszon rushing through his veins, he felt for an echo of magic and found it almost immediately, a pulse of artifice from multiple sources but all coming from one place. The treasure room--it had to be. Dack followed the signal, rounding corners and circumnavigating the walls in his way, bearing down on it like a bloodhound. As he traversed the palace, he found that the interior was as dotted with _khet phang_ as the outside, clusters huddled together in servant’s corridors or standing on guard at neat intervals. The more of the red plants he passed, the angrier he became. Not just her own citizens, but her own servants, the people who protected her and cared for her home…

  
This had to end.

  
He would get into the treasury--whatever security there was, he would break it, subvert it, suppress it. After all, he was the greatest thief in the Multiverse. He _would_ get in, and he would raid everything she had, arm himself with every artifact she had ever accrued. And then he would face her. Stop her. He wasn’t sure exactly how yet, but that did nothing to soften his commitment to the idea. All he knew was that, priorities be damned, he couldn’t leave here with this fiend in place. He hadn’t been there to help save Drakestown any more than he had been here to save the people Prohta. Maybe he couldn’t have done anything then anyway; maybe, probably, he would have just died with everyone else. However much he didn’t like it, he accepted that. But he was here now. He could do something now.

  
And this had to end.

  
Dack was getting close now, he could feel it. In fact, by his estimation, he should be able to see the treasury as soon as he rounded the next corridor. Slowing down, he calmed and quieted his breathing and put his back to the wall, stepping carefully now. _You won’t do anyone any good if you get murdered before you’ve even broken into anything._ Stilling himself, he leaned around the corner to get a look at what he was facing.

  
He stopped, confused. He wasn’t looking at any kind of treasury or vault or even a secured room of any kind. He was looking down a hallway about thirty feet long that led into an open room that he could feel was massive even from here. He could see a massive dias, huge platforms of stone stacked atop one another, and although he couldn’t see what was at the top, he knew a throne room when he saw one. Dack bit his lip. He could feel through his psychometry that there were a number of artifacts ahead of him, but the only reason he could think of to keep them in the throne room would be to keep them near to her. Which could well mean that she was there as well. And as much as he felt the need to do something about her, he knew that charging in against a spellcaster in her seat of power with her own artifacts easily on hand was a suicide mission. Before he could make a plan of attack, he needed to know what he was up against. He gave another sweep of the aether wand--more fading maintenance spells--and pulled out the Tsa’glass, cupping it in his hands to contain the small magical burst as it was activated, obscuring him. He shifted on his feet a little, light, quick, feeling the iaszon pooling all the way into the tips of his fingers and toes. His hands traced a series of quick motions, preparing a spell he’d learned from an enchanted elven hunting horn on Llorwynn. Just in case. Ready for anything, he crept down the hallway, every muscle on a hair trigger, and looked through the doorway into the throne room.  
There was indeed a massive throne at the top of the dias, an awe-inspiring piece of finely wrought silver inlaid with bright, diamond-shaped emeralds the size of his fist in a stylized eye motif. The arms stretched out to the side in two silver wings, their surfaces bearing a number of royal objects: a crown, a scepter, a signet. The entire thing conveyed eminence. Power. Permanency.

  
And in the middle of the chair, grew a massive _khet phang_, red reeds like cattails nodding out toward the throne room, wide tear shaped leaves sagging down over the foot of the dais, twisting vines like bloody veins coiling over the swirls of silver filigree.

  
_What?_

  
Dack was thrown--he had been prepared for whatever he might find, or so he had thought. But not this. Still holding the spell, he slowly entered the throne room. He was entering through the side, likely the way that the Empress’ attendants would have come in and out. Checking his surroundings, the first thing he saw was the massive crack that ran the length of the room front to back, splitting the walls and ceiling as if a giant had taken two halves of the building and wrench at them. Even the throne itself was broken, a line like a cut separating the two silver portions by several inches. Continuing his sweep, he spotted two massive white statues of armored Silurians to his right, far at the front of the throne room, and other _khet phang_ scattered throughout the huge, vaulted space. Otherwise nothing. The central dome of the ceiling was cracked right across the center, spilling in sinking purple sunlight, and was supported by carved pillars five times wider than what he could wrap his arms around. He ducked from one to the other for cover as he made his way to the dais. The steps were polished black stone, and when he reached them it was a momentary shock not to see his own outline until he remembered the Tas’glass and was able to pick out the small, telltale shimmers when he moved. Looking around once more, seeing nothing, he slowly climbed the steps to stand before the throne--avoiding the five-foot wide fracture that ran down the middle and split the stone into obsidian scalloped halves.

  
The _khet phang_ was the largest he had seen so far. Slid down toward the base of the plant, it was strung with kundan necklaces of opal and bone, diamond sarpej brooches, woven banju armbands of pure platinum, and jhumka earrings linked together by fine strands of pearls. Royal jewels. Strewn among the scarlet stems and sometimes dangling into the gap between the two split halves of the throne, as if their wearer had suddenly transformed, leaving them with nothing to attach to.

  
The Holy Empress--or what was left of her.

  
_She’s dead. What’s maintaining the Umaking then?_

  
Dack knew that it was unlikely anything so potent could continue running without a magical power source, not without draining and blighting the countryside for miles around. Looking around more thoroughly, still trying to get past a feeling of shock that blunted his thoughts, he did a quick psychometric investigation of the items around him, brushing his fingers over them to do a basic taking stock. Many of the jewels on the winged arms of the throne were simply jewels--out of habit, he scooped a number of them into the pockets of his pack. The scepter was enchanted to make people cower in the wielder’s presence; no surprise there, and nothing he hadn’t seen before in various iterations on everyone from Orzhov bishops to gangster aristocracy. The signet created magically binding contracts out of anything it was stamped on. He’d seen those before as well, and unfortunately, they only worked for the entity they were created for, keyed to that individual or organization. Not much resale value in that. The crown was linked as a command piece, likely for some kind of automata or other constructs; it shocked him, hard, when he brushed his fingers over it and he was glad he hadn’t taken a firmer hold. The crown would have to wait until later, when he could break through the protections.

  
Other than that--nothing.

  
He clenched his jaw. _Come on, you have to be missing something!_ Irritated, he slapped the arm of the throne, unintentionally brushing the _khet phang_ that used to be her Imperial Highness. And as the red leaves rustled, something glinted: a flower the size of his palm, carved out of dark metal and looped on a simple cord, and fallen a few inches into the break in the throne so that it was out of view...

  
An uneasy feeling swept over Dack. Very cautiously, he reached out and brushed his fingertips over the cold, black petals.

  
Darkness surged into his eyes, his heart, his lungs, powerful and relentless, and he was overcome with understanding.

  
It had not been made here. It had been fashioned far away, across oceans of light and color that made the Blind Eternities. Made by a man with a drive to curate and categorize all life by vivisecting it on an operating table, pulling it apart a fraction at a time and seeing what made it work, a detached collector of life and death for whom the screams of victims were nothing more than points of data. A man of ambition, ambition to shape, to control, to perfect all life by removing all the living imperfections--from every being, everywhere. Yawgmoth. A physician, he was called, but his formidable intellect was not devoted to preserving life, but to a twisted fascination with disease, plague, curses. To how life ended. Millenia ago, he had made this object, an artifact capable of destroying--Unmaking--anyone who carried mana within them, any spellcaster or sorceror or seer or child with the potential to one day light a candle with magic. He had made it to see if he could, to see if magic could be found in the body, could be pinpointed in the physical form. Targeted. His artifact was nothing less than genocide given shape, a vessel of terror and death. A plague bearer.

  
The Amulet of Flowers.

  
Dack yanked his fingers away, breaking the dark that had crystallized around him, and fell to his knees, retching. The taste of iaszon and bile was putrid, but he barely noticed as he spat the foul liquid onto the black stone steps. His mind just kept repeating, over and over.

  
_The Amulet of Flowers._

  
_The Amulet of Flowers._

  
_The Amulet of Flowers._

  
This was what the Consortium wanted, what Tam d’Shur wanted. What he had been sent here to get. He thought for a moment that maybe they didn’t know, maybe they were just following the orders for some mysterious client and didn’t know what they were asking for. But he knew it wasn’t true the second the thought came into his mind. Tam knew; he was certain of it. Tam knew what the Amulet was, and what it did. And he would use it for something terrible beyond comprehension.

  
From his knees, Dack looked back at the Amulet, wedged innocuously between the cracked pieces of the broken throne. It didn’t look like anything. That made it all the more sinister, and he felt his chest tighten. On the back of it, he could just see the protruding needle, as thin as a whisker and the length of his smallest fingernail. That was the trigger. All that was needed to unleash the plague was a single drop of spellcaster’s blood. Had the Holy Empress even done it on purpose? Or had she just come into possession of the Amulet without knowing what she had? Dack could picture it, a woman scouring the world for something to make sure no other spellcaster could stand against her, acquiring a fabled item rumored to do exactly that, holding it in her hands, investigating it, accidentally giving herself the barest scratch…

  
One tiny prick to destroy, what? A city? A continent? A plane? He wasn’t sure, because the “physician” Yawgmoth hadn’t been sure, just deeply curious to find out. It would stop spreading when it had no more victims to affect, but as long as there were more hearts pumping mana within reach, there was no telling when the influence of its power would hit a limit.

  
Dack felt cold, groping at the throne with numb fingers as he pulled himself back to his feet. He couldn’t take this to Ravnica. Scratch that: _he_ couldn’t, wouldn’t, take it anywhere, but no one could be allowed to take it to Ravnica, not ever. Half the people in the city could do some form of simple magics, and that was just the mundane citizens, not to mention innately magical beings like pixies and imps and weirds...and the endless urban sprawl meant an infinite supply of victims, within easy distance to spread from one to the next to the next, stretching to the edge of the plane.

  
His mind shut down at the thought.

  
No.

  
It couldn’t go to Ravnica.

  
It couldn’t leave.

  
It couldn’t even keep existing.

  
He had to destroy it.

  
_I can turn it off_, Dack thought, standing over it unsteadily. _I can turn it off, end the Unmaking here, for the Silurians. Then I need to get rid of it, permanently._ He was thinking rapidly, planning. He would have to make sure, make absolutely sure, that it was completely destroyed, and do it somewhere no one could get hurt. There were ways to do it, and he thought he might even know a few. All he needed was a few moments to check some things, and then he could make sure everyone was safe-

  
“Dack look out!”

  
The scream was shrill, high-pitched, and not a voice he recognized, but he didn’t waste time asking questions. Iaszon fueled muscled slammed into action as he grabbed the arm of the throne and swung down around the side, sliding beneath the winged arm and rolling behind it. He didn’t hear the heavy thud of metal driving through metal so much as he felt it in his chest, and suddenly there was a blade embedded a foot into the throne and wedged to a stop an inch from his arm.

  
Clearly, behind the throne was not a safe shelter.

  
Shoving himself away from the throne and whatever was trying to carve him up, Dack twisted to his feet and strafed rapidly to the side, his feet finding their way as he took in the situation. There were two of them, huge shapes that were faster and quieter than they had any right to be. They were in the shape of massive stylized Silurians, made of tiled armor in shades of white that looked almost like ceramic, with enormous machete at the ends of their arms instead of hands and featureless ovoids for heads. Apparently whatever they used as a sensort system wasn’t fooled by the Tas’glass, because despite having no eyes, both ovoids were currently swiveling to look at him.

  
_I hate it when people don’t put eyes on their golems! Bad enough you made a giant death machine; you have to be creepy about it too?_

  
They were both advancing at speed; focusing for a second, Dack unleashed the spell from the Llorwyn horn. A concussive blast of sound erupted out from his open palm, striking them with the force of a storm surge and bowling the backwards, a few small tiles and chips of their armor tearing loose and going spinning off across the dais. But he had little time to be pleased with himself as pain like a brand flared against his chest. The Triskelion, flaring so cold that he cried out in pain, so cold that the front part of his shirt had not only frozen solid, but began to crack off in flakes like dried paint. He quickly realized that casting the spell had triggered the escalation, because of course it had. The curse was drawn onto spellcasters, so using his magic had drawn it too him all the more strongly, forcing the Triskelion to push back harder to keep it off.

  
Dack could feel the welts frozen into his skin, and the psychometric impression of the medallion was like a tea kettle beginning to scream under the pressure of its own magic threatening to tear it apart--he was not at all sure the medallion would remain intact if he cast another spell, and he didn’t dare risk it.

  
Time to think creatively.

  
Energy surging through his limbs, Dack took off across the throne room, sprinting for the center. The two Silurian golems were already back on their feet and heading for him at a kind of bobbing lope that he found very unsettling. He noticed that unlike actual Silurians with their heavy, balancing tails, these constructs had tails that terminated in long, thin ends like whips; as they ran, the tails moved up and down in a wave motion and snapped chunks out of the stone floor. One more thing to watch out for, then. Turning, he reached into his pack until he felt a ridge metal sphere, grabbed it, and began running back at the golems. As he did, he quickly pressed a set of the ridges in order, the rolled the sphere out in front of him.

  
With a noise like a blade striking an Azorius mage-shield, the sphere gave off a burst that filled half the throne room--and everything in that half began floating off the ground. Unprepared for gravity to suddenly fail them, the two golems began moving _up_ as well as forward, tumbling through the air with nothing to anchor them. Dack, who had absolute been prepared, charged at the, under them, hit the edge of the sphere’s field, and leaped. Iaszon made his legs as strong as they had ever been, and he surged upward through the air to land against one of the columns, taking advantage of the many handholds the carvings offered to grab on and anchor himself, perching against the column well off the ground as effortlessly as a Dimir vampire. It wasn’t a permanent solution, obviously, but it gave him a moment of safety to prepare, to think. He already had his hand in the pack for the next available artifact, and looked around the room, trying to see what he could use to his advantage.

  
What he saw instead was a tiny shape, crouched behind one of the columns and staring at him, blue eyes wide and beaked mouth agape.

  
“Nir!” he yelled. “Get out of here!”

  
Nir looked terrified, but still shook their head emphatically. In his peripheral vision he saw the golems, airborn, hit the edge of the anti-gravity sphere at thirty five feet up and drop unceremoniously to the floor in a heap, then all-too-quickly starting climbing back to their feet, circling the edge of the sphere to get closer to him.

  
“Gods damn it Nir, _go_!”

  
“No!” they cried back in a shaking voice. “I’m not leaving, I-”

  
Dack never found out what explanation the little Silurian had been about to give. One of the golems had moved to about twenty feet from Dack’s column refuge, and, lowering its blank head, snapped its tail forward. The whip like end telescoped outward, lengthening into an impossibly long tether of jagged white, and plunged into his thigh just above the knee like a harpoon. He was fairly certain he screamed then, and even more certain when it pulled the tail back, yanking him off the wall and reeling him sharply downward. The tail-end came loose, dragging free of his flesh with a loud, horrific sucking noise, and momentum carried Dack to the ground.

  
He came free of the anti-gravity sphere, landed hard on one shoulder, heard the loud pop as it violently dislocated from its socket. That time he didn’t scream, just gasped like a grounded fish and flopped limply on his back. But it was alright--he heard Nir screaming on his behalf, shrill and sharp. That was considerate of them. Vibrations on the ground announced the golem’s approach; groggily he felt the small canister shape of whatever he had managed to grab from his pack in the palm of his good hand. The golem loomed into his field of vision, and he saw places at the joints where the armor separated. Hoping he had what he thought he had, Dack felt for a button with his thumb, depressed it, kicked hard with both feet to flip himself up to a standing position, jammed the canister deep into the things hip socket, and ran.

  
He didn’t get more than few steps before the explosion burst behind him, slamming into his back and knocking him back to the floor, this time rolling painfully with his dislocated arm flopping like a loose banner. But he still came out better than the golem, who was now reduced to just a torso. A torso, Dack noted, that was still moving, still trying to drag itself around by hammering its sword arms into the ground and pulling itself. An ambitious torso. Suddenly, its oval head swiveled, looking away from him and toward one of the columns. Dack spotted Nir’s face peeping out from behind the stonework--and so, apparently, had the golem as it began slithering toward them.

  
Swearing, Dack looked around, spotting the other golem as it loped around the room toward him, avoiding the anti-gravity sphere. With only one of them paying attention to him now, he could have made a run for it, found a side room and planeswalked out even--but then he would be leaving Nir alone with those things. Cursing even harder, he moved away from the undamaged golem and toward the crawling half-golem, limp-running painfully on his injured leg and rummaging in his pack with his good hand for whatever he could find. He grabbed something, looked down at it; it wasn’t ideal but it would have to do. Staggering up behind the prone golem, he snapped the open red-and-black ring over one of its wrists. The ring slammed shut, sprouted a massive bouquet of red ribbons and black leather straps that coiled briefly in a billowing cloud before pouring down over both of its arms and binding them together, immobilizing it.

  
Distantly, Dack felt a small pang of regret. That device had been a gift from a very nice lady of his acquaintance in the Rakdos entertainment district. They’d gotten a lot of good use out of it, and she wasn’t going to be pleased that he’d lost it. If he lived, he hoped she understood--Rakdos could be tetchy about that kind of thing.

  
“Move!” he yelled to Nir, not breaking stride as he lurched up and put a hand behind their back, forcing them ahead. “It won’t hold for-”

  
A heavy impact slammed into his side, ripping him away from Nir and sweeping him in an arc across the room, sending him sprawling to the ground at the foot of the dias. He choked, rolled to his knees, and spat blood, feeling the cracked end of a rib frictating against each other. Right now the iaszon was the only thing keeping him upright and moving in the face of the pummeling he was taking; much more and the iaszon wouldn’t be enough, because he’d be a battered corpse. From the corner of his eye he saw the half-golem beginning to shred out of its bindings like a terrifying butterfly emerging from a colorful cocoon, and the intact golem was nearly on top of him. He jammed his hand into an emergency pocket in the pack and slipped on what looked like a set of brass knuckles, clenching his fist and activating a blue hemisphere of translucent light. The glome raised its swords and brought them down on the shield; it made an alarming _pwong_ sound, but it held. It was top-quality--he’d stolen it directly from an Azorius armory--so he figured he had a half-dozen more strikes like that before it cracked like an egg and the golem split him in half.

  
He looked for Nir. They had darted over behind the throne, crouching in terror as the half-golem began to untangle itself and claw its way toward them. Dack desperately wanted to help, but the protective force-dome was stationary. He couldn’t move. And even if he could, what would he do? He could use any of his spells without dying, and unless he had a spell which could both golems, which he doubted, Nir would die shortly after him. And he couldn’t give them any of his gear or artifacts, because magic just shut down as soon as they touched it-

  
That was it.

  
“Nir!” he tried to yell, cut off abruptly by a wracking cough and a spray of blood, then the heavy thud of the golem’s swords impacting his shield. “Nir!” this time he got it out. Nir’s gaze snapped to him, panicked. “Put the crown on!”

  
Nir stared at him, baffled, helpless. The swords came down again, causing the shield to flicker. Quickly, Dack dropped the shield, pointed to where the crown had fallen on the floor, and jerked has hand back up to reactivate the shield just as the swords fell again, this time causing the edges of the shield to begin shrinking as the shield’s power started running out.

  
“Put the crown on, Nir!”

  
Nir looked at the crown, then at the crawling golem getting perilously close, and was rooted to the spot. Dack could see the fear and uncertainty in the huge, strange eyes.

  
“Trust me!” he screamed--knowing that if he was wrong, they were both dead anyway.

  
That seemed to be enough. Scampering forward, Nir grabbed the crown as a one of the golem’s swords plunged into the dias mere inches from their hand. The swords came down, not with quite enough force to go through the shield, but with enough force to drain it, what remained of the blue dome bursting like a bubble. Raising the swords for the final blow, the golem lifted its arms, then drove them downward in a lethal arc. Nir put on the crown.

  
Dack didn’t realize he had closed his eyes. But when he opened them, he was looking at a pair of sword tips, halted in midair a hand’s breadth above his nose. Shifting his eyes, he saw that the other golem was stopped as well, arrested in mid-movement just a few feet from Nir. Nir, meanwhile, stood stock still, shaking like a leaf, with the crown draped hurriedly over their small brow. Dack let out a huge sigh of relief and awkwardly, painfully, shimmied out from under the hovering blades. He got to his feet and climbed the dais to go to Nir, but just short of his goal his punctured leg gave out, and he collapsed next to the throne. Iaszon did a potent job of suppressing pain and letting the user work past the damage, but at some point enough was enough.

  
Flopping back against the steps, he reached out his good hand to Nir--after a second, they reached out their tiny scaled hand and placed it in his. He couldn’t tell which one of them was trembling so hard, and it didn’t matter. They’d both earned it.

  
“Good job Nir,” he said, letting his head flop back against the throne. “You saved me, you save Prohta and your people--you did it.”

  
There was a long silence. Then: “I did a good job?”

  
Despite the fact that it made the ends of his rib grind painfully, Dack chuckled. “You did fantastic. Maybe don’t follow any more strangers to any more dangerous places for a little while though, huh?”

  
“Right,” they said in a shaky voice. After a moment, they spoke again. “Dack?”

  
“Yeah?”

  
“What do I do now?”

  
Opening his eyes, Dack reached out and patted them gently on the shoulder, and felt surprisingly cheerful despite his injuries when they leaned in and very softly tapped their muzzle on his jaw. “You go home, kiddo.”

  
He stretched back behind him, wincing, and reached into the crack in the throne, hooking a finger into the loop of cord and pulling out the Amulet of Flowers. Bracing himself for the connection--which was not as bad now that he was expecting it--he touched it with his psychometry, found what he was looking for, and uttered a few words in a language long dead, far from here. Like a bud blooming in reverse, the metallic black lotus twisted itself back up into the tight, smooth shape of a seed. Nir gasped, and he turned to look where they were looking. Behind him, the _khet phang_ that was once an Empress crumbled away into fine, ashen-pink powder. All around the throne room, and down the hall, and all over the city he was certain, the other cursed plants were doing the same.

  
It was ended.

  
Dack sighed and slumped back against the seat of the throne, now empty except for a tiny pile of dust, swirling in the hot breeze pouring in through the crack in the ceiling. “Now you go home, and you tell them what happened. Tell them the Unmaking is over--tell them we did it.”

* * * * *

Dack landed in a heap in the re-entry room in the Consortium, too badly off to catch himself, and barely managed not to break his nose when he hit the floor. Normally he was embarrassed about his off-target planeswalking, but right now he was just happy to be somewhere that had healers on staff. And they were thankfully prompt, surrounding him within moments of landing. The small ogre, Jadrun, came into his field of vision and began laying on glowing hands and stitching his ribs back together, ordering someone near his legs to start healing the massive puncture in his leg. He felt woozy from exhaustion, dehydration, blood loss, and falling four feet to the ground, and frankly freezing after the temperature shift from Vashra-jir, which might have explained it, but at that moment he thought that Jadrun’s purplish, horned, tusked face was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen in his life.

  
Dack would have kissed him if he were more confident that his nose wasn’t broken.

  
For awhile he just lay spread-eagled on the Consortium floor, letting the healers work and feeling bones slowly mending back into place, flesh growing shut once again, dozens of painful cuts and bruises gradual fading as if weeks were going by in moments. Then there was a voice in the doorway.

  
“Tam wants to see you in his office.”

  
Dack wanted to say something, but Jadrun beat him to it. “We’re still working. Tell Tam he’ll need to wait.”

  
Dack couldn’t see what was going on, but swore he could hear the attendant shaking his head. “Now.”

  
So Dack was put on his feet, given a potion to stabilize him that tasted mostly like strawberries and only a little like Simic bio-brew, and hustled off to the big office as much as it was possible to hustle him. He spent the walk dragging his feet on the excuse of injuries, breathing to steady himself and preparing his lies. Tam d’Shur was a telepath, true, but Dack always liked to be prepared for anything.

  
Even lying to a mind reader.

  
Before he had left Vashra-jir, he had taken out a small pot a drawn a quick rune on his brow, which flashed, faded, and disappeared, leaving only a faint smell of camphor. The pot had come from Clan Ojutai on Tarkir--he had once stolen a scroll for them, and since they had little gold, they had given him a number of valuable items as payment. Most he had sold, but this one he had kept. It was an oil that, when applied, would make your words appear true to mind mages as well as to listeners. The wasn’t the first time he’d used it--fortunately, Azorius mind mages were thorough but not particularly shrewd and had never caught him applying it, thinking the smell was just a cologne--and his supply was running low. Maybe he’d go back to Tarkir at some point. He was planning to tell Tam that he wasn’t interesting in taking on any more Consortium contracts, and he knew he might want to skip the plane for a bit after that, depending on how well he took it. But he’d had enough of the oil to get through this conversation at least.

  
And the Amulet of Flowers was gone. That was the most important thing. When he’d gone into the Blind Eternities to return to Ravnica, he’d taken off the Exalted Triskelion. It had served him well, but he needed it to serve the Multiverse more. Pressing the Triskelion against the Amulet, he’d bound the two medallions together with their cords, letting the two opposing energies interact, eat at each other, destabilize. Protections from a deity, and blight from the man who would become one. When the combined pair were shaking and eroding, on the verge of obliteration, he released them into the swirling chaos. Already at the edge of disintegration, as soon as the two left his possession they swirled, surged at each other, and bust into infinite pieces of light and shadow, scattered to the aether. No one would ever be saved by the Triskelion again. No one would ever be cursed by the Amulet again. It seemed a fair trade.

  
Now he just had to explain things to Tam.

  
When he arrived in the office, Dack flopped into the chair as tiredly as possible, trying to give the impression of a wounded man, worn from fighting at the front and running on iaszon fumes. Which he was. Sitting across from him, Tam watched with those hard, golden eyes.

  
“Do you have it?”

  
Never one to waste time with pleasantries, Tam. Dack sighed. “I’m doing great, by the way. And no, I don’t have it.”

  
Tam’s mouth formed a hard line. “Why not?”

  
“Because it wasn’t there,” Dack snapped, letting real irritation seep into his voice. “I went through a damned grinder with the golems guarding the place, but when I finished things up with them and got to the case where it should have been--nothing.” He shook his head. “I checked it. There was still some residual magic; it was there at one point, but as far as I can tell it’s been gone for years.”

  
“Did you check?”

  
“Course I checked,” Dack said with annoyance. He might be lying to Tam, but that was no reason to ask a disrespectful question like that. “I have no idea where it is now, but I definitely know where it isn’t.”

  
“Hmm,” Tam said. “How unfortunate. And do you have anything you’d like to add to your report? Anything you’d like to share?”

  
Dack shook his head. “What’s to share? I got my head beaten in for nothing, and your intel’s out of date.” He shrugged. “Looks like we both lost out on this one.”

  
Tam nodded slowly. “So it would seem.”

  
A piercing agony drove through Dack’s skull. He gasped and dropped his head into his hands, pressing them against his forehead to try to make the pain stop, pain like having part of his mind shredded with razors. He wanted it to stop, thought he might have been begging, but the shrieking in his head made it too hard to concentrate, too hard to do anything. He couldn’t even scream.

  
Tam was at his ear. “Insolent little whelp, slinking in here lying and stinking of camphor,” he hissed, cold with fury. “You think I don’t know about your barbarian oils? You think there is _anything_ about you that I don’t know?” Tam shook him, hard, and the movement amplified his pain a dozenfold, making Dack certain he would black out, making him wish he would black out. “Our founder wanted that Amulet, you pretentious fucking nothing, and _you_ thwarted him.”

  
Tam gave him a shove, and Dack went sprawling to the floor. Two attendants entered the room, although Dack could only see them as dreamlike smears of color.

  
“Strip him and have him thrown into a cell--one of the mageproof ones,” Tam instructed the men coldly, and Dack felt them grab his arms, haul him off the floor. “No healers,” he added.

  
Tam leaned in to his face, and Dack’s vision was filled with predatory yellow eyes. “I’m going to hang you out to dry, Dack. I’m going to leave you down there to stew, and rot, and think about how you’ve just made the biggest mistake of you life. And eventually, when your pathetic oils wear off and when thinking of you chained to the wall down there ceases to amuse me, I’m going to have you dragged out, and I’m going to find out what you did with the Amulet. And then I’m giving it and you over to the dragon. And if you think this is bad...” His brows drew together and the pain spiked again; Dack’s intended scream came out as a low moan. “You find that it’s a tickle compared to what Bolas will do to you.”

  
He snapped his fingers. “Get this garbage out of my sight.”

  
Then Dack was moving away from him, feet dragging along the floor as he was pulled unceremoniously through the corridors. He knew he was being dragged along a route of maximum visibility, as an example to the rest of the Consortium, but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was the mind-destroying pain in his head, barely fading as he got distance between himself and Tam.

  
_I should have just taken the damn Amulet,_ he thought. _Should have handed it over and gone to mind my own business on another world for a while. Shouldn’t have tried to play hero._

  
But to his surprise, Dack found that--even now--he didn’t mean it.


End file.
